Check out the grim vibes on this monochrome dungeon crawler

Image from monochromatic fantasy dungeon crawler Demon Lord Reincarnation

(Image credit: Graverobber Foundation)

Every once in a while you hit an art style that's just really working for you. That's why I'm right here right now looking at Demon Lord Reincarnation, an upcoming dungeon crawler that seems pretty determined to only use one or two colors on a black background for all of its art. Art that's really beautifully complimented in that monochromatic palette, with lots of stylish highlights done using the black negative space. I mean just look at this guy.

Demon Lord Reincarnation is in development with Ukrainian indie studio Graverobber Foundation, whose stated mission is to inject new ideas into Dungeon RPGs. It's straightforward classic, brutally hard, first-person dungeon crawler: "Assemble a party, explore the dungeon, fight your way through hordes of monsters, and defeat the Demon Lord" says the store page.

The two big things with Demon Lord Reincarnation seems to be permadeath and skill acquisition. On Twitter, a developer stated that when a character dies they can't come back. Their spot in the party, however, can be filled with a new person scaled to around the party's level—either of the same class or a new one, and with classes I've spotted in screenshots like Knight, Brawler, Valkyrie, Sage, Executioner, and Mage, I've got a feeling you'll be doing some weird experiments with those party slots.

The other is skill acquisition: Your characters start with one skill and acquire more, as many as eight, during the game. The skills are learned, however, during battles: You have to fight to progress, and they're drawn from class skill pools to the point that a developer says "two characters of the same class are unlikely to have identical skill sets."

So if you like making your way through a dungeon, fighting a bunch of bad guys, and statting out characters, keep an eye on Demon Lord Reincarnation as it moves towards a release date announcement—if only because dang does that art look nice.

You can find Demon Lord Reincarnation on Steam.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.